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Haiku OS Resurrects BeOS as Open Source
Technical Writing Geek writes "The Haiku project, which began shortly after the death of BeOS in 2001, aims to bring together the technical advantages of BeOS and the freedom of open source. 'The project has drawn dozens of contributors who have written over seven million lines of code. Although Haiku is nearly feature-complete, there are still numerous bugs that must be fixed before it is ready for day-to-day use. The design principles behind Haiku are very closely aligned with those of BeOS. The central goal of the Haiku project is to create an operating system that is ideally suited for use on the desktop--this differs significantly from Linux and other open-source operating systems which are intended for use in a diverse range of settings including server and embedded environments.'"
But I don't look forward to the long climb up the curve of identifying and cleaning up what, going by past experience, is likely to be quite a nest of security issues.
Having said that, if it is actually like BeOS in that it handles multimedia similarly (that is, *really* well and without even a nod towards DRM), I'd be very likely to put some effort into using it. Linux's swap paradigm is completely unsuited to applications that need to respond *right now*, OS X is just about the same (it's only been a matter of hours since I shook my fist at Leopard for swapping out things I was using), and Windows... ugh. Going completely the wrong way.
I suppose it'll be a while yet, though. [prepares to wait]
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
Haiku is an example of code reuse par-excellence! You can get a normal desktop footprint into something like 60 megabytes. (Not one of these cut-down small footprint distros.) It's how an object-oriented multimedia operating system should be done.
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=236331448076587879
Haiku is damn cool
The One OS that follows
Don't Repeat Yourself
>>Multimedia works just great on my Windows XP machine.
Please don't take this as an insult, but the reason you feel that multimedia works "just great" on your XP box is probably because you've not seen anything better. In the same way propeller-driven aircraft were just fine until jet engines came along. BeOS *was* better than anything else at the time (Can't speak to Haiku, as I've not run it). I ran BeOS as my primary OS for several years and in those days Windows would struggle to play two (or sometimes just one) video smoothly, with well-tracked audio. BeOS had no problem on the same hardware with a half-dozen simultaneous videos. It could simultaneously import video, mix audio tracks and play video streams, render 3D graphics, etc. and when it did slow down, it did so gracefully and never failed to respond the way that Windows would (e.g. click a menu, wait 20 seconds for Win to load the code and draw the menu).
The main thing is, BeOS was amazingly fast and responsive in the days of I486 CPUs and 128Meg RAM. Menus and UI elements responded instantly. Cold boot to completely loaded desktop, on the net, HDD light off and ready to work? Something like 15 seconds. Windows took something like 2 1/2 minutes by comparison and the HDD never quit rattling. Why? Clean design internally and small size -- about 50MB for the whole OS including sample applications, code, and demos. (Or to put it another way, about the size of one of the hundred-or-so security patches for Windows XP.)
From a programmer's perspective, BeOS was the best-designed OS I've ever coded for. Everything was logically named, well structured and designed with threading in mind. (In fact, every window ran in its own thread). Written entirely in C++, it was just brilliantly designed and easy to code for!
Personally, I'm pretty excited about Haiku. IMO, BeOS was the best OS from the 90s. (BeOS was created by a spin-off group from Apple France, the same group that defied Steve Jobs' direct orders and developed the Color Macintosh (early 1990s?) and saved Apple. I was profoundly disappointed that Apple chose NeXTStep over BeOS for what was to become MacOSX.
So, that's my long-winded way of saying "give it a try! You have no idea what you're missing."